In November 2009 I decided to change my life from unhealthy to healthy lifestyle and lose weight to be healthy person, and this was a big and hard decision to make it's like paradigm shifting so that I should be careful with every step I take and analyze what to do next and how to it right.
My Journey step:
First step I went to nutrition doctor rather than going to gym like most of Egyptian men do, which all they do is burn fat and left some weights but still eating junk food, which I think it's an awful thing to do, because you solve one part of the puzzle and left the other parts unsolved.
Second step start to love healthy food and walk for long durations and distances, but I did this step in baby steps style, which made it a habit rather than something to do to lose weight, for example I start to walk for small distance if there's no transportation to it, or if this distance will take 10 minutes to reach OK then walk rather than ride a transportation, and Thanks for my iPod, I love walking while listing to my favorite music, and right now I'm working on running, I hope I'll make habit also :D
Third step is mastering what's to eat and what's not to eat? After 3 or 4 months on diet I start to understand what is healthy food? How to cook it in home? And I learned how to make it perfect healthy food (I'll define it later), and this's what makes me love healthy food.
The intelligent thing to do is to know how to cook the perfect healthy food, and its hard thing to accomplish on the first diet days, but keep on and you'll.
I have a definition for 3 kind of food which is (IMHO):
- Healthy Food: Food usually looks awful and has bad taste, but its health and gives you the energy in need.
- Unhealthy Food (Junk Food): Food usually looks nice and taste good, but gives you unnecessary fat and calories.
- Perfect Healthy Food: Food usually looks nice and taste good, it's like combination of healthy food and junk food, and this kind of food is very useful when you're in diet.
My journey in losing weight (form 160 Kg to 110 Kg till now) was too damn hard but the benefits was huge, all my back and knee pains gone, and I'm feeling that I'm very light even sometimes when I'm walking people think I'm running, but actually it's brisk walking.
Some Advices:
- Nutrition Doctor: Go to nutrition doctor, and please be honest with him, if he ask about your eating habits tell him everything , and during diet if there's something wrong tell him next visit and he/she will solve this problem, and he/she will make some blood tests to check your health status and will try to heal you, like my doctor she's found out the I'd Anemia and she heal it within 2 months.
- Drink: Try to drink a lot, drink a lot of water, tea, coffee, herbals, non-alcoholic beer, diet soda, and skimmed milk, It's helps you to avoid the hunger feeling, trust me it's works even sometimes I feel like I'm drinking more that eating :D.
- Diet Plan: Try to stick with you nutrition doctor diet plan.
- Walk, walk, walk: It's very important thing to do during diet, walk whenever it can be, park your car 10 minutes away from your work so you'll walk for 20 minutes every day, take stairs if you can like in malls for example.
- Free Meal: In diet plan there's a one free meal per week, eat it whenever you want but don't make it's time static, take it when you want to eat or miss junk food; during diet this meal is very special because you eat whatever you like.
- Frustrations: If you measure your weight and find out that it's increasing don't frustrate it's not a big deal keep on diet and you'll lose it, just keep persisting, and keep negative thoughts away, and remember you're breaking a habit and this's a very hard thing to do but not impossible.
Note: I'm still on diet as I said my weight now is 110 Kg and my perfect weight is between 95 and 85.